Educating Rita

Arts
The Newfoundland Herald, March 14, 1987
Jack of all trades but a master actor
By Philip Hicks

Brian Downey is one of the two actors in Willy Russell's Educating Rita; he plays Frank, the old university professor, to Alison Woolridge's Rita, a young working girl who wants to be educated. There is a love affair, of course.

This latest Rising Tide production, directed by Jeff Pitcher, opened at the St. John's Arts and Culture Centre with three performances, March 12 to 14, before touring the island and Labrador between March 16 and 25.

Brian Downey and I met one evening after rehearsals. "Frank, in the script, is early- to mid-Fifties -- which is a stretch for me." That's all he would say about his age, and he continued to be as vague as possible about dates throughou the interview.

Yes, he was born in St. John's, in the east end, but no street was mentioned. Yes, he did go to school, "a Catholic, all-boys school," and he gave its name, but not for publication.

At 17, or so, he began a "series of short-lived careers" -- banker, coin collector, clerk in a store, truck driver, assistant in a photo lab, executive trainee, labourer in Labrador City, and musician in Montreal.

Quite a list. There would have been more, but Brian Downey decided to put in time at Memorial; he still carried on his meandering course, switching from one Humanities department to another -- sociology, social psychology and English. Social responsibility and the purpose of life were the in-things then.

"My first appearance as a performer came while I was at MUN. I was back-up musician to the bandleader, and suddenly she announced, 'Now Brian is going to sing one of his own songs.' I protested violently but had to sing. Applause. 'Now Brian will sing another one.' I was furious. I sang, and more applause.

"I thought to myself this is easy, and came to enjoy it. But not without misgivings. It was another notch on my psyche; I accepted the responsibility that goes with performing but somehow I didn't want to be up there only for the applause."

Meanwhile the Humanities at Memorial receded into the background. The group played coffee houses in Montreal, Toronto, Halifax and the Maritimes. Brian Downey bought a farm in Nova Scotia, so there must have been some money around.

He tried a year at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the early Seventies, doing the foundation year programme. I asked whether he had really been interested in the visual arts. "Yes, but I didn't fit in there."

Next, it was working in a crafts store kept by an eccentric in Petite Riviere, and then back to Newfoundland, doing music and soundtracks for CBC radio or TV programmes and documentaries.

Then followed a couple of years playing with a western group in bars. "An incredible eye-opener," he says; "I didn't know that sort of life existed."

He moved from band to band, performing in community halls, church halls and at teenage dances round the Avalon Penninsula, from Torbay to Bale Verte, and from Corner Brook to Rocky Harbour.

"My needs were few. I earned a reasonable living but most of the money went in upgrading equipment and meeting the expense of being on the road. I was doing other things as well, the CBC programmes, working in bookstores, and for a while as a DJ."

In 1978, at the time he was with the East End Blues Band, Brian Downey met Chris Brookes, who was artistic director of The Mummers, and who wanted to do a musical about the possible after-effects of an offshore oil discovery.

"It dealt with things that did, in fact, come to pass later. As someone said, the first great mistake we could make was to believe the oil companies knew what they were talking about; the second, that the federal govenment did the same, and the third, to think that either of them cared."

The show was Some Slick, a fabulous success, which started with the then longest-ever run at the LSPU Hall, and contineud on and off for a year, touring Toronto and elsewhere. NTV made a video and broadcast it. A collective, Brian Downey had several parts; this was his first appearance on stage.

What were the milestones in his acting career from then on? "Rising Tide wanted to put on a musical about the changing attitude to sex, which became I Was a Teenage Love Doll. I played Bern, and the other performers were Donna Butt, David Ross, Jane Dingle, Mack Furlong and Denis Parker."

His first performance "without a band" came with Somewhere Over the Border. A traumatic experience, as he still remembers: "At the first rehearsal Donna Butt gave us her ideas about the play, togeher with how and what we were going to improvise.

"I was so nervous I went to the washroom. I told myself I wasn't an actor. I wanted out, to tell Donna she had made a mistake, that she had the wrong person. But when I went back, before I had time to say anything, she called out 'Let's get to work,' and that was that."

In 1981 Brian Downey played Victor in Arthur Miller's The Price. By this time he had picked up a number of improvisation tricks; now he had to discard them.

The Price, sensuous, well written and very moving, with four people in the cast, required a whole new way of dealing with the stage and with the other actors. "It was very demanding. But, step by step, I was learning to be an actor all the time -- a growing process, and it was a struggle having to leave things behind."

Joey came in 1982 -- another significant step up the ladder for him, and a tremendous success generally which took the cast across CAnda. "It was a new issue. We were saying things that hadn't been said before. We created images of a country and of a person, and of times that said something to us as Newfoundlanders. Apart from that, for me a great acting experience."

Brian Downey reckons working with Western CAnda Theatre Company in British Columbia was his next major move. He first did that in 1985, playing Nicola in Shaw's Arms and the Man, directed by Bernard Hopkins.

"One more eye-opener. I was working with people from across the country. One had been on the stage for 30 years. The director never took a note but he knew exaclty what he was about. It was all very structured, very formal and very disciplined."

Meanwhile the actor was doing plenty of radio, TV and movie performances, ranging from the filmed version of Some Slick for NTV in 1980 and Joey for CBC-TV in 1982, to Lukey in Pigeon Inlet in 1984-85, Milo in a two-part episode in The Beachcombers in 1985, again for CBC-TV and more recently, Burgess in John and the Missus, with Big Island Productions in 1986.

True West, with the Elysian Theatre Company and Ed Martin directing, in 1986, was "a great realization; it was the first play in which I was able to use, and was encouraged to use, the tools I had been accumulating over the years. It was also the first, strong, new, American play I'd done."

It was True West, I think, that indicated just how good an actor Brian Downey could be. And it was both a culmination and a pointer in the direction of things to come.

He has gone on widening his range and experience -- "Beachcombers impressed me with its sheer professionalism" -- and his trip to Argentina last December to shoot a feature film there was another learning experience.

The striking thing about this actor is his flexibility and his increasing potential. He is prepared to work, to change, to grow out of what he has already done, and to treat everything as part of an ongoing process of development.

He is clearly fascinated by the process, discovering wider applications for the tools he has, and turning up new ones he didn't know he possessed.

Which is what professionalism is about, of course. Maybe being a jack of all trades is as good a base as any to build an acting career. It certainly has worked in his case.